I don't want to hijack the other thread but noticed this offshoot form of primitive Baptist listed. I've been doing family history work and found many primitive Baptists, including some with PBU leanings and/or membership. I recently ran across this two seed in the spirit form in my family searching. I looked it up online and found a tiny bit of info, but am looking for more to understand them and their place in history. Really specific info would be about them in Tennessee and Texas, but any info would help.

Linda, from what I understand, the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists are pretty much the offspring of the fertile mind of Elder Daniel Parker. IIRC, he was born in Georgia, grew up in Tennessee, preached in Illinois & Indiana, then moved to Texas. I believe the Wikipedia article on this group is fairly reliable:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit_Predestinarian_Baptists

Elder Daniel Parker organized the Pilgrim Predestinarian Regular Baptist Church in 1833 in Illinois, then they moved to Texas. Pilgrim Church still exists today, near Elkhart, Texas, and I have visited it a number of times. It no longer holds Parker's “Two-Seed” doctrine. It is an Absolute Predestinarian Primitive Baptist Church. I must say I've never grasped much about the Two-Seed doctrine. It seems pretty esoteric to me. As best I can find out, there are only about 4 or 5 churches who currently admit to being “Two-Seeders". There is a church in Jacksboro, Texas which is in an association with a church in either Illinois or Indiana. I visited this church once. It was a very cold winter day and only a few people showed up. We sang a few songs and left. They didn't have preaching, but I did talk to the preacher a bit. Most of what he explained went over my head. Valdosta State professor and a Primitive Baptist, John G. Crowley, says one may still find Two-Seed doctrines preached by Primitive Baptists in southern Georgia “if one knows where to go and what to listen for.”

Several years ago I read an article (I think it was in The Quarterly Review or Baptist History and Heritage) in which the author wrote that he believed that Parker developed the two-seed theology to try to reconcile why God would elect certain people and leave others out — the answer, to him was obviously that those others belonged to the devil from the start!

Levi Roberts, a missionary Baptist who opposed Parker’s theology, would write that he knew Parker and “always considered him a good man, possessing a warm heart, a clear head and giant intellect…” (From The Banner and Pioneer, June 5, 1847). Though Parker's name is eternally tied to “anti-missions,” he was an indefatigable worker who became a preacher, pastor, theologian, author and publisher, as well as a state senator, — and planted churches personally in at least three states.

J. M. Carroll declared that Daniel Parker’s ministry “left a mighty empress on East Texas” — whether one was Missionary or Anti-Missionary Baptist. Carroll obviously disagreed with Parker, but was clearly impressed by the missionary work of the anti-missionary preacher, noting “And as a result of these various services, over this large territory, organized, through its own efforts, nine new churches. How many churches in Texas, country or city, can show such a record?” (A History of Texas Baptists, W. T. Parmer gives 11 rather than 9).

Elder Parker's terminology also inspired the name Mrs. H. and I go by in our sporadic efforts at theological and ecclesiological satire: the Three-Sheets-to-the-Wind Antidisestablishmentarian Baptist Association.

Thanks! I'm still trying sort out those that hold to Satan seducing Eve and Cain being the progeny of that union from folks holding to an outbreak of fallen angels mating with human women previous to the flood from those that hold to that pre flood outbreak plus an outbreak producing the Anakim.

My mind may break a sweat trying to sort them all out.

And trying to track how much the Texas folk influenced the eastern NM folks in the 20's.

linda wrote:Thanks! I'm still trying sort out those that hold to Satan seducing Eve and Cain being the progeny of that union from folks holding to an outbreak of fallen angels mating with human women previous to the flood from those that hold to that pre flood outbreak plus an outbreak producing the Anakim.

I know that Parker denied/did not hold to this being a literal physical seduction, but some later Two-Seeders did.

linda wrote:And trying to track how much the Texas folk influenced the eastern NM folks in the 20's.

Don't know about that one.

I've found that a "Two-Seeder" who was a doctor in our county in Texas wrote a pamphlet about the doctrine. It may have circulated fairly widely among their own people, but I have not been able to locate one.